CHAPTER 129

  THE EARTHEN CROWN

  The storm broke.

  Sand fell like dying rain, settling over a battlefield that no longer resembled a coliseum but a shattered dream of stone and sky. Jagged cubes of earth protruded over another in impossible angles, stairs leading nowhere, cracks glowing faintly red where the planet bled from Dijkstra’s power.

  The Warlord was making a statement, standing at the centre, his body fused to the trembling ground. Veins of molten aura crawled across his armour as he planted his massive blade into the earth—Earthen Crown—. His final and most devastating move, the skill he had developed in his grade 90 stage.

  “You’ve given them a show, boy,” he said. “But now it ends. Blame your luck that you are born in his era.”

  Theodred dragged himself from a pile of rubble. His wings were torn light, one half-flickering, his shield in shards. His armour clung by threads, skin striped with grit and blood. And yet—he stood. His breathing ragged, his aura guttering.

  He raised his sword, Maximacre humming faintly, but his voice was already gone.

  Dijkstra lifted his tectonic weapon. “Pride till the last. That, at least, is knightly.”

  Theodred drew in a breath, and something inside him broke. Not bone, not will—something deeper. Like a flickering light, he put his everything on his final strike.

  His sword reached Dijkstra, who could’ve easily avoided the now slower strike. But he met it head-on. The sparks flared as Theodred’s cleaving sword met Dijkstra’s Earthen Crown body.

  Not a single millimetre, his sword got deflected in an instant.

  Dijkstra took on a fighting stance, his right fist pulling the tectonic force and slammed hard on Theodred.

  In a flash, Theodred struck the boundaries of the opposite, crossing the entire arena. It was force enough to make a blood pool.

  But in his instant journey, Theodred had used Armis several times.

  Now he was out. Not even his Regenratio was working.

  DeepStep. Dijkstra, the massive earthen armoured, stood front of barely breathing Theodred.

  Everyone knew what was coming. Parv wanted to kill him—and there was no prey that had escaped from Dijkstra’s clutches.

  Many stood on their seats, gasping. Some, hoping for an upset, had cheered on for him. Some who ridiculed him stood in admiration. The boy had fought the sad death toe to toe. Not giving in, but now was unconscious, losing massive blood.

  They wished Dijkstra could spare the young knight, but their wishes got stabbed just as Theodred’s chest was struck by Dijkstra’s dull blade.

  “Agh!” His consciousness came back as the pain gave the signal.

  His hands clenched the impaling sword, resisting. Resisting.

  “You still had something—I don’t mind.” Dijkstra pulled back the sword, giving him a huge hole in his chest. Hans bled profusely, vomiting blood, but his will to survive provoked Dijkstra further.

  A cube of each erected beneath Theodred’s battered body. Rising high together with Dijkstra.

  Another surfaced above him, ready to pummel him down.

  And with full force, it struck like a hammer on an anvil and Hans in between.

  There was no question left for the mouth-covering audience that the victor was decided. All left for them was whether there was a breath left in Theodred or not.

  As his body fell, Reina’s heart sank with it.

  But his body got caught by Dijkstra’s upheaval spike. The hole in his chest widened as he was impaled by a much wider ground spike. The spike bathed in blood turned red.

  “Anything before I snap your neck, kid?” Dijkstra murmured, pressuring his shoulder. The boy had given him something to remember.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  Dijkstra stepped into his earthen spike, strolling towards Hans’s half-torn torso.

  “Mrsetoros.”

  “What did you say?” Dijkstra asked, surprised at how Theodred could even mumble.

  With so little strength, the sword that never left his hand swung above at him, but it barely reached. His hand hung like a pendulum, and the sword finally slipped away. His consciousness was fading; he was dying.

  The sword almost slipped, but it didn’t. Hans’s hand found whatever was left in him to just hold it by two fingers.

  “I—said—Restore.”

  As if it were a magical word. The earth spike in him shrunk back to earth. His pass-through hole in the chest healed instantly. His vigour and aura came back in an instant. He was in full shape and form.

  “That was fucking close—I wanted to meet my father but not this way.” The wings unfurled from his back and his eyes darted to Dijkstra, who was baffled at how this was happening.

  This was Sierra’s magic—or something more divine. Even the Indu priest, whose expertise in healing was eating their hats, was eating their hats. Sierra too.

  “I’m glad this worked out—my plans hardly do,” he recalled, asking Aadya to charge Kindness with her mana of restoration. “I wanted to save it for a do-or-die situation—well, I’m in one of those situations.”

  His wings of freedom fluttered, literally proving their name’s meaning.

  While Dijkstra laughed maniacally. He had thrown everything on this upstart, and yet he rose again. His madness was rising.

  Meanwhile, in Clandor’s private chamber, all eyes were trailing from Theodred to Reina. “What is he? Did you know about this?” Bernard asked her.

  But her answer remained the same, silence.

  Sierra, in the Concordia’s section, was standing up. Never in her years had she seen the divine magic so pure. As if Yudwin herself had breathed life back into him.

  Aura roared from him, searing white, tearing through the cracks in his battered armour. He extended an empty hand. Light congealed, condensed, and then bled into shape.

  A second sword. Pure aura, fragile as glass, blazing like a fallen star.

  The crowd gasped. Even the air seemed to hush.

  Theodred shifted into stance—dual blades. One steel, one light. His gaze locked on Dijkstra, fevered and unyielding.

  Their clash began like thunder.

  Dijkstra swung down the weight of continents. Theodred crossed both blades and met it, the ground groaning as stone slabs cracked beneath his knees. His aura screamed in protest. His bones creaked like old wood.

  He twisted. Slid past the impossible weight. His left blade, the aura-forged one, cut only air—but something unseen lingered. A trace. An invisible scar drawn into space itself.

  He pressed forward, striking again, missing by inches, leaving another trace. And another. Each dodge, each near-fall, each desperate slash stitched the battlefield with invisible light scars that no one noticed. Not yet.

  Dijkstra’s voice rolled like a quake. “You can swing as much as you like, boy. The earth swallows wasted effort.”

  But then he stepped too close.

  The invisible lattice of after-strikes flared to life. White scars surfaced around him, cutting skin, slicing stone, tearing through his earthen crown armour. Shallow, endless wounds that refused to close. Fester fused into each trace, rotting his regeneration. A streak of red marked him from a dozen cuts that had appeared from nowhere.

  For the first time, Dijkstra staggered.

  His growl was a landslide. “What trickery—”

  Theodred’s smile was raw, teeth red with blood. “Not trickery. Timeless Strikes.”

  Dijkstra roared, pulling more of the planet into himself, the arena quaking as he raised his final strike. His blade burned with the lifeblood of continents, a weapon meant to split armies.

  Theodred launched. Wings flared white. Both swords screamed with Maximacre, one steel, one aura, both leaving their trails behind. He didn’t block the giant’s final blow—he dived past it, shoving his light into the ground beneath, his LumenGaze pinpointing the connection as he unraveled the foundation of EarthenCrown.

  The connection of planet powering Dijkstra was cut off. The cracks he had mastered turned against him, and the invisible scars flared across his body, dozens of silent blades cutting deeper.

  His roar shook the coliseum, but his footing broke. His body collapsed, stone-hard limbs giving way, his aura bleeding into dust.

  Theodred drove both swords into his wounded shoulder. Light burst from the wounds, consuming the colossus from within. Dijkstra fell to one knee, for the first time. His massive sword slipped from his grasp like a toppled pillar.

  Hans appeared to the side of kneeling Dijkstra, crouched and shoved an uppercut that stuck to his guts, and with every fibre of his being, he pushed upward, his wings flapping hard to raise the behemoth, a little then with full force high.

  The upheaval spikes came obstructing him from many directions, but like a skilled avian, he flew, dodging it with massive speed.

  Upon crossing the reach of earth. He launched Dijkstra even higher while he looked down at him.

  Ha! Heaving a long breath, he propelled.

  Sirius Strike

  It wasn’t the half-baked, but the original, the intensity not even mastered by Chris but its own creator.

  Arat rose from his seat as Hans became the aura drill that reached the speed of light and drove both his swords into Dijkstra’s wounds.

  And as if it wasn’t enough, he turned him over and dived faster than gravity.

  The Warlord met the ground like a meteor as Theodred rode over.

  The arena shook, and tremors reached the audience.

  Soon the dust settled and Theodred’s sword etched closely to Dijkstra’s neck while his left leg pressed on Dijkstra’s unwounded hand.

  “You lost.” He declared, and the crowd cheered in excitement. An upset had happened, and the wave was something else. For nearly two decades, the top ten rankings were undisturbed, but now the new wave was coming.